er special young cousin
to Gilbert both because of the old affection for her mother and
because she had played hostess to him in Canada when her mother was
ill. He wrote

Postmark. Aug. 28, 1934

MY DEAR MOLLIE,

I am afraid that chronologically, or by the clock, I am relatively
late in sending you my most warm congratulations--and yet I do assure
you that I write as one still thrilled and almost throbbing with good
news. It would take pages to tell you all I feel about it: beginning
with my first memory of your mother, when she was astonishingly like
you, except that she had yellow plaits of hair down her back. I do
not absolutely insist that you should now imitate her in this: but
you would not be far wrong if you imitate her in anything. And so
on--till we come to the superb rhetorical passage about You and the
right fulfilment of Youth. It would take pages: and that is why the
pages are never written. We bad correspondents, we vile non-writers
of letters, have a sort of secret excuse, that no one will ever
listen to till the Day of Judgment, when all infinite patience will
have to listen to so much. It is often because we think so much about
our friends that we do not write to them--the letters would be too
long. Especially in the case of wretched writing men like me, who
feel in their spare time that writing is loathsome and thinking about
their friends pleasant. In the course of turning out about ten
articles, on Hitler, on Humanism, on determinism, on Distributism, on
Dollfuss and Darwin and the Devil knows what, there really are
thoughts about real people that cross my mind suddenly and make me
really happy in a real way: and one of them is the news of your
engagement. Please believe, dear Mollie, that I am writing the truth,
though I am a journalist: and give my congratulations to everyone
involved.

Yours with love,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

And in that year came two bits of public recognition of rather
different kinds. He was elected to the Athenaeum Club under Rule
II--Honoris causa; and he and Belloc were given by the Pope the title
of Knight Commander of St. Gregory with Star. During these years the
paper had gone steadily on "at some considerable inconvenience"
because, he said, he still felt it had a part to play. At home and
abroad the scene had been steadily darkening. In July 1930, three
years before Hitler came